Google’s sneaky new Android 4.4 launcher is about to take over your homescreen

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For years Android fans have lamented the fact that they couldn’t just push a button and replace their smartphone’s interface with stock Android. The release of KitKat (Android 4.4) won’t change that, but it looks like Google has finally delivered the next best thing. As of yesterday, the company is completely re-imagining the Android search experience, a change that could have a much larger effect on the homescreen than you might have guessed.

Of the many changes to Android 4.4 under the hood, this may end up being the most significant. In the past, Google’s Launcher app has been something you could only get if you either owned a Nexus phone. In other words, if you bought a Samsung GS4 with TouchWiz or an HTC One with Sense, for the most part that’s the UI you were stuck with. Soon that’s likely to change, and instead it looks like you’ll be able to switch to the Google way of doing things on just about any Android phone.

Ron Amadeo at Ars recently discovered that the homescreen for Android 4.4 was a little different than it was before. Most of the code that you interact with when using the homescreen on the Nexus 5 isn’t actually happening in the homescreen app. Instead, the action is taking place inside the Google Search app.

There is still an APK in the system labeled “GoogleHome.apk” but all it does is forward everything to the Search app.

Curious as to why this matters? There are two reasons. First, this update ensures that Google’s homescreen experience is available on every phone with the Google Play Store installed on it. When a phone goes through Google certification, it has to allow all of Google’s core apps to be installed. Google Search is a core app, and every phone with the Play Store has it installed. This search app is updated through the Google Play Store, which could also mean that this could affect more than just Android 4.4 devices when a new version becomes available to download. The new search APK has been proven to work on 4.3 already, so it could be retroactive.

The second reason this is significant, and possibly the more important of the two, is how all of this is wrapped into Google Search. Google now has control over a launcher on every Android phone that swipes over to Google Now, which it uses for contextual information gathering and delivery.

A big part of Google Now is content delivery — for example, telling you when TV shows are on or when movies hit the theater. If you’re close to a restaurant in its database (and you haven’t disabled the card), Google Now will let you know. This creates a delivery mechanism for content that Google has had available on every Android phone, but is now moving from offering a service to gently nudging it in your general direction.

Android will effectively become a vacuum for Google search with Android 4.4. With the new app indexing features being made available in KitKat, Google will be able to pull information from apps and use it to display more relevant results to users. Searching for a recipe could drop you off inside your favorite cooking app, for example. The whole phone becomes part of the search results, with Google at the helm deciding which results are the most relevant. In the end this is great for the users interested in this experience, and it paints a clear road for Google taking control of their OS once and for all.